A ‘Petulant’ Snub

May 8, 2015 in Montana

by William Skink

At Consortium News, Ray McGovern begins his dismantling of Obama’s snub of Russia by using the term petulant in the title of his piece, which you can read here. It begins like this:

President Barack Obama’s decision to join other Western leaders in snubbing Russia’s weekend celebration of the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe looks more like pouting than statesmanship, especially in the context of the U.S. mainstream media’s recent anti-historical effort to downplay Russia’s crucial role in defeating Nazism.

Though designed to isolate Russia because it had the audacity to object to the Western-engineered coup d’état in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, this snub of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin – like the economic sanctions against Russia – is likely to backfire on the U.S. and its European allies by strengthening ties between Russia and the emerging Asian giants of China and India.

Obama is able to pull off a recklessly childish snub like this because the domestic media landscape has become a bizarro world of echo-chamber distortion when it comes to the happenings of foreign affairs. Ukraine is one of the most dangerous focal points of this world. It’s sucked in otherwise seemingly intelligent people into defending an obviously western-backed coup, opening the door to the rising influence of far-right, Nazi-2.0 shock troops.

Later in the article, McGovern has this to say about the reporting of the New York Times:

Distorting the History

So, the evidence-based history of the Western-sponsored coup in Kiev on Feb. 22, 2014, must be forgotten or covered up. Indeed, about a year after the events, the New York Times published a major “investigative” article that ignored all the facts of a U.S.-backed coup in declaring there was no coup.

The Times didn’t even mention the notorious, intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in early February 2014 in which Nuland was handpicking the future leaders, including her remark “Yats is the guy,” a reference to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who – after the coup – quickly became prime minister. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine.”]

Even George Friedman, the president of the Washington-Establishment-friendly think-tank STRATFOR, has said publicly in late 2014: “Russia calls the events that took place at the beginning of this year a coup d’état organized by the United States. And it truly was the most blatant coup in history.”

McGovern goes on at the link, describing the continued failure of major media outlets.

It might be a good summer to keep the social unrest simmering and erupting every so often as America’s insane global posturing escalates tensions everywhere else, like Syria. At MoA, b puts it this way: It’s Official: The U.S. Collaborates with Al Qaeda.

It amazes me how well the situations in Ukraine and Syria have been run, at the information level, for domestic consumption. They’ve come a long way since Vietnam at playing the information game. It’s going to totally suck if WWIII is a consequence.